With over 1000 CBD brands in the market, the CBD industry in America is exploding. Hemp-driven CBD products have helped many with health problems, and it provides an alternative to illegal drugs like marijuana.
If you are thinking about getting into selling CBD online, you should be aware that you will need to set up an ecommerce platform and be able to properly help clients find the right products for them. When deciding on which platform is best for your business, you should keep a couple things in mind.
Self-hosted
Whether you choose to start your own business based on your own platform or someone else’s can determine how many technical problems you might be facing in the future. When you choose to self-host your ecommerce store, then you will need to make sure that you have a quality web designer available to handle building the necessary pages, do the required marketing for CBD, and create a quality user experience.
WordPress has been everyone’s go-to hosting site for a long time thanks to the simplicity and ease of use it offers. Woocommerce is an ecommerce platform that supports WordPress and they are often used together. If you are going to self-host your store, you will probably want to use these tools more than any other options on the market.
Both of these self-hosted options can scale along with you, making them the right choice if you expect your store to grow massively within a year or so. While most of us dream about this happening, most of us also start small and build up to a larger store. When you go with self-hosting, you are personally in charge of all the technical aspects of your store, and customer support is limited. If this is your first website, then you might want to choose an option that offers more support and you can start with.
Hosted
Choosing a hosted platform means that you don’t have the same customization options that you might if you choose self-hosting, but there are a number of other benefits instead. One of these is that it is super simple to create your domain, set up shop, and advertise your products. These platforms also make it much simpler to sell CBD products than having to set up your self-hosting site in order to do so.
If you are first starting out and you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a web designer and time setting up your platform, then it might be a better idea to start out with a platform that is hosted. Later down the line, if you wish to expand or add new features, then you might want to look into how you can transition to a hosted platform
Which one should I choose?
Both hosted and self-hosted offer unique benefits that can end up either helping or harming your business. Much of it can depend how much knowledge you have going into this enterprise and how much time and money you want to spend setting up your store in the first place.
